OR AS LONG as there has been pulp fiction—a cheaply printed, working-class form of escapist literature—there have been “anti-heroes.”
COMIC strip characters come to life: Diabolik (John Phillip Law) and
Eva Kant (Marisa Mell) elude the police after a daring heist in DIABOLIK.
In 1857, Victor-Alexis Ponson du Terrail published the first installment of Rocambole, ou Les Drames du Paris, a newspaper serial about a murderous master criminal who eventually sees the error of his ways and turns his formi- dable talents to more lawful ends. The serial lasted until 1870. In 1905 came Arsène Lupin, the brainchild of Maurice Leblanc, a wittier variation on the Rocambole concept that escalated the personality of the eponymous character to the fabulously inescapable; no matter where you hid your jew- els, the great Lupin could plunder them at his leisure. Spoof- ing the seminal pulp invention of Arthur Conan Doyle, Leblanc opposed Lupin with the master detective “Hemlock Sholmes” in some of his earliest adventures, including the story collec- tion La Dame Blonde/Arsène Lupin versus Hemlock Sholmes and the novel L’Aiguille Creuse/The Hollow Needle. 1911 saw the first appearance of Fantômas, the diabolical thief, assas- sin and master of disguise created by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, whose popularity flourished over a series of thirty-two novels, which were followed by another ten writ- ten solo by Allain, following the death of his partner. All of these characters were popular with the Surrealists, who appreciated their elements of surprise and triumphs of style over the mundane, but they were particularly be- loved by the working class, who enjoyed their descriptions of the higher classes having their upturned noses tweaked by these daring agents of terror.
